2017-2018 CISSR Book Workshops

The Patchwork City: Urban Fragmentation and Populism in Manila

The Patchwork City explores the role of spatial changes in transforming the nature of class relationships in Manila. Marco Garrido argues that, during the 1980s, new urban planning practices and widening social inequality combined to segregate lower-class slum residents from middle-class enclave residents, heightening class consciousness in the city. The book traces the processes connecting segregation and class division to political contention as the two classes have become susceptible to divergent political appeals -- populist on the one hand, authoritarian on the other. His focus is on Manila, but Professor Garrido uses the case to tell a larger story about the spatial and social transformations occuring in cities across the Global South.

The Universal Enemy: Jihad and Empire after the Cold War

In the U.S.-dominated world order of recent decades, there has been no figure more ubiquitous and vexing than that of the Islamist "foreign fighter" waging jihad in various war zones, from Somalia to the Philippines, Afghanistan to Chechnya. Such fighters have come to stand in for a rejection of the very idea of universalism itself, through their disregard for national borders, their rejection of secularism, their violations of humanitarian standards, and their commitment to violence. In a radical departure from previous works on political violence by non-state Islamist actors, Darryl Li argues that pan-Islamist jihads should be understood as universalist projects - lived attempts to implement a vision notionally directed at all of humanity in the face of racial and cultural diversity - that can be productively compared to and contrasted with intervention undertaken in the name of the International Community. The Universal Enemy is the first ethnographically grounded and theoretically engaged account focusing on contemporary pan-Islamist jihads, focusing on Arabs and other foreign Muslims who joined Bosnian government forces during the country's 1992-1995 war. Unlike books on armed Islamist groups aimed at "understanding the enemy," The Universal Enemy explores the relationship between pan-Islamist jihads and the U.S.-dominated world order in order to shed critical light on both. (Under contract, Stanford University Press)

2018 CISSR Monograph Enhancement Awards

The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt

Angie Heo, Assistant Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion, Divinity School

From the Arab uprisings in 2011 to ISIS's rise in 2014, Egypt's Copts have been at the center of anxious rhetorics around the politics of Christian-Muslim coexistence in the Middle East. Despite the unprecedented levels of violence they have suffered in recent years, the current predicament of Copts signals more durable structures of church and state authoritarianism that challenge the ahistorical kernel of persecution politics and Islamophobia. Angie Heo’s book examines the political lives of saints to specify the role that religion has played in the making of national unity and sectarian conflict in Egypt since the 1952 coup. Based on years of fieldwork throughout Egypt, Heo argues that the public imaginary of saints – the Virgin, martyrs (ancient and contemporary), miracle-workers - has served as a key site of mediating social relations between Christians and Muslims. It further delves into the material aesthetics of Orthodox Christianity to grasp how saintly imaginings broker ties of sacrifice across faiths, reconfigure sacred territory in times of war, and present threats to public order and national security. Above all, it draws attention to the ways in which an authoritarian politics of sainthood shores up Christian-Muslim unity in the aftermath of war, revolution and coup. In doing so, this book directly counters recurrent and prevalent invocations of Christianity's impending extinction in the Arab Muslim world. (Under contract, University of California Press)

Gender Inequality in the Japanese Workplace

Gender Inequality in the Japanese Workplace was awarded the 2017 Nikkei Economic Books Culture Award in Japan, given annually to a few books. The book offers a comprehensive analysis of employee data and employer personnel policy data that account for the wage gap, gap in promotion to managerial positions, professional job segregation, and inequality in labor productivity experienced by employed Japanese women. In addition to reviewing theories of gender inequality developed in the U.S. and Europe, the book's analysis has important implications for policies aiming to eliminate gender inequality in Japan. It will be published in English by Springer.